Re: Seems like treatment of NTFS ADS (foo:bar) changed between 1.5 and 1.7 but not mentioned in What's Changed

[Thomas Wolff <towo at towo dot net>]

Christopher Faylor wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 04:03:14PM +0100, Thomas Wolff wrote:
>   
> > Christopher Faylor wrote:
> >     
> > > On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 03:55:43PM +0100, Thomas Wolff wrote:
> > >   
> > >       
> > > > Thomas Wolff wrote:
> > > >     
> > > >         
> > > > > > ...
> > > > > >             
> > > > Anyway, maybe some syntax could be found that would not be too harmful 
> > > > to become "reserved" for this purpose...
> > > > <end:of:rationale:for:weird:feature>
> > > >     
> > > >         
> > > Sorry but I agree with Corinna.  On linux/UNIX you can create a file
> > > with a colon in it.  We can now do this in Cygwin 1.7 and that's a good
> > > thing.  Complicating the path handling to deal specially with colons in
> > > a filename doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
> > >   
> > >       
> > Sorry that I take this up once more (after promising <end:of>), but I 
> > had this additional idea after seeing your point about being strictly 
> > consistent with the POSIX pathname namespace:
> >
> > So what about using "/" as a delimiter? If "foo" is a file, "foo/bar" is 
> > not a legal pathname in POSIX, so it could be used to access the "bar" 
> > fork of "foo" without causing real harm. There might be stronger 
> > objection to implicitly creating a fork with this syntax than to just 
> > accessing it, which could be resolved with either a $CYGWIN-configurable 
> > option or a mkfork command.
> >     
>
> How could we possibly use '/' as a delimiter?  Are you really advocating
> that we treat every file as a potential directory?  So every time
> someone says "foo/bar" and "foo" is a file we try to open "foo:bar"?
> And what happens when someone says "ls -l foo"?  Should that work too?
>   
I'm not really "advocating" it, it's just an idea how it could be 
handled in case support *is* desired.
And yes, if someone *wants* access to this NTFS feature, why not this 
way? It's a trade-off - weird (but acceptable) handling for a  weird 
feature.

Whether the default for ls is to show forks or not, might be 
configurable again. If it does (maybe with -l or -a or -la), it could 
look like:
... foo
... foo/bar
so it should not pretend a virtual directory structure here.

Thomas

--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple